CES Preview: What We Expect in 2009

In the midst of the sharpest recession in recent memory, will anyone care about the latest gadgets and gizmos at the Consumer Electronics Show? The industry thinks so. We do too. And we'll show you what we think the industry will use to whet your appetite for 2009 in our preview.

Contents

The darling of the holiday selling season, the GPS device is also headed into, ahem, new directions in 2009. GPS makers plan to lower prices, plus add better routing capabilities and connected features. Want more? We've dedicated a separate article on the subject, with far more detail.

Desktop PCs

Look for a whole bunch of new all-in-one desktops.

With economies of scale moving from desktop components to notebook-based components, it will be cheaper for system makers to build desktops with notebook-class components like hard drives, motherboards, integrated graphics and yes, LCD screens.

To be sure, the power users will still want massive towers with Intel's Core i7 or AMD's Phenom II processors, (the latter will be launched at the show) upgradeable graphics and space for up to six hard drives, but the masses will be attracted to semi-portable machines with larger screens than you can find in your average laptop, for the same price.

Laptops

As you might expect, notebooks will be where the action is at CES  so much that we've dedicated a separate article on the subject. How can you squeeze discussions of new netbooks, form factors, multitouch displays, and WiMAX into a few short paragraphs?

Storage

The storage market evolves in slow, measured ways, as always. We'll see lots of announcements surrounding portable drives at larger capacities, with a big focus on preserving and backing up precious memories. Of course, that means bigger hard drives, but this year, look to the flash market for some interesting announcements. Flash memory/solid-state drives and memory cards will grow exponentially this year, and gain some interesting new backup functionality.

Specifically, hard drive capacities of between 320 Gbytes and 500 Gbytes will become "normal" now that notebook drives have hit that capacity easily and cheaply. Is the first 1-terabyte notebook drive in the wings? Drives at 1.5 TB and even 2-TB capacity points are a no-brainer for the NAS and power-tower PC users. Look for more media-centric applications for hard drives, now that video downloads are commonplace with the widespread adoption of even faster broadband connections. You have to store all that data somewhere.

Finally, expect to see some demonstrations of USB 3.0 as well, which promises a tenfold speed boost for external storage products.

Hello, Microsoft? Google? AOL? Yahoo? All four are keeping their lips closed and their briefcases sealed. The noticeable lack of major consumer software developers' participation aside from Microsoft is the news here. AOL and Yahoo had pretty big presences last year, but this year? Nada.

Given that Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer is expected to make a keynote address (replacing Bill Gates, who has moved away from Microsoft into charitable work), some Microsoft news is a given. The rumors? Don't expect a Zune phone to be launched at CES, although the topic has been a hot one over the past couple of weeks. What we hear is that while the idea of a Zune phone isn't dead, it won't be announced at CES.

But when you're speculating on what news MS may have on at CES, don't forget an Internet Explorer 8 beta, Windows Live betas, and a Zune store. Of course a beta of Windows 7 would be the crowning item. Office 14 probably won't have anything happening, but they may show it, with its Web client. The latest Windows 7 blog post indicates that they're anticipating people benchmarking the beta, although they frown on it.

So far, we've knocked on the doors of the other major software houses for their comments, but only Skype has passed along something juicy.

"Skype's executives will be sharing their vision for enabling consumers to connect to Skype whenever, wherever and however they choose," the company said. "The company will be unveiling some new products that take concrete steps towards this goal." Does that smell like a Skype app for the iPhone to you?